Rah Rah Cis Boom Bah Yay Stimulus

That the Baltimore Sun is a cheerleader for all things Obama is a given. However, their latest “for make benefit of glorious leader” effort is simply juvenile.
Paul West takes issue with Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain “misstating” the purpose of a $28,900 NIH stimulus grant to a University of Maryland graduate student.
Coburn said the grant’s purpose was to determine “whether methamphetamine gives female rats an overpowering desire to have sex.” While the graduate student says the purpose of her study is to “‘explore the molecular underpinnings’ of meth-induced sexual behavior and would use immunocytochemistry and other advanced techniques to examine the drug’s impact on brain cells in rats.”
West also notes that Coburn has been champion for publicizing the dangers of methamphetamines.
Oh the hypocrisy. West must be patting himself on the back for Herculean achievement in hair splitting to uncover such base duplicity.
Furthermore, West elides Coburn’s point that the grant, like most of the stimulus does not in actually help the economy. I’ll concede that some of the NIH grants do create jobs. However, these jobs are temporary and last only a few years until the grant money runs out. They aren’t the long lasting jobs created through sustained economic growth. Most grants go to support researchers, who are usually already tenured faculty. The jobs created are for lower level support staff and research assistants, who are paid a pittance.
It is instructive that while the AP and other newspapers are uncovering over 90,000 bogus jobs “saved or created,” by the $787 billion stimulus; the Sun’s senior political reporter’s instinct is to lamely defend the stimulus by parsing the words of it’s critics.
Heaven forbid West look into the $2,900 grant to Applicator’s Inc to restripe a parking lot at Andrews Air Force Base, which claimed to save seven jobs at a whopping $418. Or the Silver Spring surveying company, which reported ten jobs created with stimulus money it hasn’t received for a project it has yet to start.



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